When we differentiate, we simply offer students opportunities to think at a level appropriate to their ability - not their age nor their grade level.
I get lots of questions from overwhelmed folks who have suddenly landed in a new job in gifted ed and have had little training. "Where do I even start!?" is a very common cry. Here are three places to begin differentiating for gifted kids.
When writing a lesson’s objective, we have to pick specific resources so that students can do the thinking we want from them.
If you want to differentiate, you have to be ok that not every student will do every single task.
How do you handle grading within a differentiated classroom? While differentiating is certainly complex, this part is pretty simple, actually!
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.
Get students moving, thinking, writing, and reading each others’ ideas with a Scholar’s Cafe.
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.
An easy way to spice up any lesson is to remove the god-awful samples and replace them with selections from great works of art, music, film, tv shows, and historic moments. You get the added bonus of exposing students to new ideas.